Release Summary Video

Get a quick tour of the major features of this release. The Release Summary video includes segments on:

Scorecards

Analytics

Report Technology Updates

Portfolio Planning Menu & Terminology

Portfolio Item Levels

Bubble Chart

Communities

Scorecards

Available for Programs, Projects, Portfolio Items and Teams, the Scorecard is a central location for key metrics in software delivery. This feature can be accessed from the Report menu, the Details page of the above mention items, and from Planning Rooms. In addition to be being available in the application, the Scorecard is responsive and URL addressable, enabling you to view it on a monitor in your office or on a mobile device while you travel. The Scorecard page is broken down into 3 parts. At the top there are summary metrics that give you the big picture of the remaining work. The middle section contains charts that trend this work over time. Finally, at the bottom of the page, the work is broken down into smaller components, by Project, by Portfolio Items and by Team. Additionally, on the Team Scorecard, a Member breakdown is provided.

Portfolio Planning Menu & Epic Terminology Updates

A new main menu section has been added to begin to consolidate functionality used for portfolio and program level planning. Now, you can more easily focus on higher level planning separate from your managing product-level backlog.

In addition, the Epic attribute has been renamed as a Portfolio Item to help reduce confusion around the term 'Epic' and its use in the application versus its use in the evolving marketplace and frameworks such as SAFe.

Plus, you can still link directly to relevant Roadmaps via the roadmap icon next to the Project Navigator or in the project path when hovering over any project title.

The terminology changes will be rolled out in your system upon upgrade. If you would prefer to switch from 'Portfolio Item' back to 'Epic' terminology in your system, ask your system administrator to use the Terminology Overrides section on the Admin > Configuration > System page to update the Portfolio Item entry to 'Epic'.

Portfolio Item Level Differentiation

Color has been introduced to more clearly differentiate the various levels of planning. Select a color to represent each Portfolio Item Type so you can understand at a glance whether you're viewing high level initiatives or lower level features. The Portfolio Item Types already conform to your internal lexicon, so now you can associate colors with them to differentiate as easy as, say, stories and defects. See the difference in the newly named Portfolio Tree, Portfolio Kanban, Portfolio Timeline, Portfolio Item Details and in the hovers, just in case you ever need a reminder.

Configurable Bubble Chart

The Bubble Chart represents a method to view and compare portfolio items across multiple dimensions at once. The Bubble Chart is now much more powerful with the ability to configure the dimensions to display. That is, you can select which attribute is used to display for the:

X-Axis

Y-Axis

Color

Size

Select from existing or custom fields on the chart configuration to utilize any internal value you choose to track on your various portfolio items. Like filters, your configuration selections are sticky so they will be saved when you return to the chart. As a user-level option, you can also choose to examine the same set of portfolio items from different angles simply by adjusting your configuration parameters and selecting one or more new values for your dimensions.

Communities

Establish, evolve and promote Agile best practices across teams and throughout your entire organization with Communities in VersionOne. This solution drives consistent behavior and promotes the evolution of Agile teams.

Agile coaches can now create and make available to all users content on how to do Agile and how to use VersionOne “your way”. Also, ad-hoc Communities of Practice can be created to allow for sharing any content (agreements, best practices, etc.) between users with a common interest, i.e. UX Professionals, Agile Testers, .Net Developers.

Quick Search allows the users to easily find the topics they are looking for from anywhere in the application.

Many pages in the application also have the quick topic reference link (next to the Collaboration button). You can pin relevant topic for each one of the pages to ensure that all users see topic related to that page. For example, the topic on User Story Estimation may be pinned to the Backlog page.

To jump-start the creation of the communities and the evolution of the practices, VersionOne is now pre-seeded with a set of common Agile best practices, developed with the help of Agile coaches and evangelists. These practices can easily be changed, evolved or replaced with the needs of your organization.

Account Administration

Administrative users can now see certain account information details on the new page found under the Administrator --> Account menu.

Following information is displayed, when available*:

Product edition

Renewal date

Renewal quote or invoice

Number of licensed users

Number of current users

Your VersionOne contact info

*Those accounts with non-standard setups (e.g. multiple production instances) will not yet have direct access to some account information.

Core Reporting Updates

Enhancements

In this release the following charts were updated to use the new Reporting technology:

Active Member Trend

Defect Priority Trend

Defect Resolution Trend

Defect Status Trend

Effort Trend

Issue Trend

Project/Program Summary

Request Trend

Story Velocity By Risk

Story Velocity By Type

Velocity By Date

Velocity By Priority

Velocity By Project

Velocity By Status

Fixed

The following issues, some might call them defects, are resolved in this release

Chart Title is partially hidden

Workitem Cumulative Flow includes work closed before report start date

Epic Cumulative Flow includes work closed before report start date

Other defects closed in previous point releases

Data Mart Updates

Added indexes and restructured some queries to reduce the ETL load performance.

The meta-data used to populate the Custom Reporting UI is properly updated when Custom Fields are removed from the Core VersionOne instance.

Analytics

Enhancements:

The filter parameters on the Feature Completion SAFe Dashboard panel and chart were updated to align with the Epic Progress SAFe Dashboard panel and chart. Both panels include the same set of Epic filters and they both report the current state the selected Epics.

Filtering on the Issue Trend Dashboard panel was updated to align with those available on the Issue Summary panel. This change provides improved visibility into the impact Issues are having over time around dimensions such as Type and Source among others.

A date based version of the Agile Earned Value panel was added to the Analytics Dashboards. This allows you to trend work delivered against a plan when teams work on different iteration schedules.

Fixed:

The following issues, some might call them defects, were fixed in this release.

Integration Updates

New: Tasktop Dev for VersionOne

VersionOne has partnered with Tasktop to offer an enhanced integration with Visual Studio and Eclipse IDEs. This enhanced integration provides developers with the ability to create and manage VersionOne Epics, Stories, Defects, Tasks, and Tests (including effort tracking) all within the context of their IDE.

Tasktop Dev for VersionOne is a free IDE plugin available to all VersionOne customers and replaces VersionOne's current native Visual Studio and Eclipse plugins.

Sunset: VersionOne Integrations for Visual Studio and Eclipse

With the release of the new Tasktop Dev for VersionOne integration, we are formally sunsetting our native integrations for Visual Studio and Eclipse following our documented Sunset Policy for Integrations.

New: Topic Asset

A topic represents the current state of an evolving practice within a community. It is a resource that serves as a focal point for discussion. For now, a topic must have at least one Community relation. Topic attributes include:

Updated: List Type Value Color Attribute

A new required attribute has been added to list type values used for dropdown lists to assign each a color. The Portfolio Item Type is the first list to make use of the new color attribute within the application's user interface.

Deprecated: Java and .NET Object Models

The Java and .NET Object Models have been deprecated and are no longer supported by VersionOne. They are now open-sourced and supported by the development community. Please see VersionOne Java SDK and VersionOne .NET SDK for alternative API libraries.

System Requirements Changes

None

Miscellaneous

Removed Infragistics Graphing Libraries

Upgraded HighChart libraries

Images can be inserted into rich text fields while creating a new asset

Point Releases

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